A True crime Podcast

In June 2000, Marianne Pedersen and her two sons, Brian and Dennis, vanished from a house in Rødovre, Denmark. There were no bodies. No graves. Police later searched 8,500 tons of incinerator slag and still found almost nothing. The man who lived there was Peter Lundin — already convicted in the United States of killing his own mother, already deported, already free under Danish law. Host Alexande...

For 23 years, Marcel Lychau Hansen coached football, cleaned planes at Copenhagen Airport, and lived as a family man on Amager. At night he was something else. In 2010, DNA from one attack finally tied him to two murders and a string of rapes dating back to 1987 — including the killing of 73-year-old Edith Andrup and schoolteacher Lene Buchardt Rasmussen. Host Alexander Lawson tells how Amagermand...

On 3 March 2021, Sarah Everard was walking home through Clapham when a police officer pulled over, showed a warrant card, and put her in handcuffs. Five minutes later she was gone. That officer was Metropolitan Police constable Wayne Couzens. He kidnapped, raped and murdered her — then tried to cover it up. He is serving a whole-life sentence. He will never be released. But this episode is not onl...

December 20, 2024. A rented BMW tears through Magdeburg’s Christmas market. Sixty-four seconds. Six dead — including a nine-year-old boy — and more than three hundred injured. The driver is Taleb al-Abdulmohsen: Saudi-born psychiatrist, ex-Muslim activist, and a man German authorities had been warned about for years. Host Alexander Lawson traces how al-Abdulmohsen arrived in Germany in 2006, built...

On January 1, 2025, a rented Ford F-150 tore through New Year’s crowds on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. Fourteen people were killed. The driver, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, was an American Army veteran, a former Deloitte consultant, and a father from Texas. Hours earlier he had posted videos pledging allegiance to ISIS. Host Alexander Lawson traces the documented path—from Beaumont and a decade in unifor...

Four in the morning. Two students walking home after exams. A caretaker on his way to work. By sunrise, three people are dead and three more have been run down in the street. In this episode, Alexander Lawson examines the 13 June 2023 attacks in Nottingham: the killings of Barnaby Webber, Grace O’Malley-Kumar and Ian Coates, the van attacks on Wayne Birkett, Sharon Miller and Marcin Gawronski, and...

Four University of Idaho students went to sleep after a Saturday night out. By morning, Kaylee Goncalves, Madison Mogen, Xana Kernodle, and Ethan Chapin were dead. Host Alexander Lawson traces the 2022 killings at 1122 King Road in Moscow, Idaho—the knife sheath left at the scene, the white Hyundai Elantra on neighborhood cameras, the phone that went dark, and the genetic genealogy that led police...

On a lonely stretch of Long Island highway, a police dog found four women wrapped in burlap. The man who left them there commuted to Manhattan, ran an architecture firm, and lived with his family in Massapequa Park. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the story of Rex Heuermann — the Gilgo Beach killer — from the 1993 murder of Sandra Costilla through the killings of Ka...

Malmö, 2009. A parked car. Eleven shots. A twenty-year-old woman dead in the passenger seat — and a city still telling itself the gunfire was just gang war. For years, Sweden’s third-largest city lived with a pattern it didn’t want to name: a licensed shooter on a bicycle, choosing victims by how they looked, how their names sounded, or who sat beside them. He called it a race war. What he built w...

Stockholm, August 1991. A red dot appears on a young man’s back. Then a shot. Over six months, eleven people — almost all immigrants — are gunned down in Stockholm and Uppsala. One does not survive. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of John Ausonius, the bank robber and far-right shooter the Swedish press named Lasermannen. Born Wolfgang Zaugg to immigrant parents, he changed his name, dyed hi...

In March 1943, while Finland was fighting the Continuation War, an escaped prisoner named Toivo Harald Koljonen walked back to a farmhouse in Karhiniemi with a stolen axe. By morning, six people were dead — including two children, aged eleven and six. The country would remember him as Kirves-Koljonen: Axe Koljonen. Alexander Lawson tells the story of the Huittinen massacre, the manhunt that follow...

A boy late for school opens a bathroom door in East Helsinki and sees his father standing over his mother. Ten years later he walks into a police station and says it was never an accident. That phone call unmasks Ismo Junni — a Finnish construction worker, drinker, and father who murdered five people between 1980 and 1988. He drowned his wife in a bathtub, then burned drinking companions alive in...

Just after 2 a.m. on 6 July 2010, a petty argument in a McDonald’s drive-through in Porvoo, Finland, ended with three men shot at close range. The gunman had turned 41 the day before — and seven months earlier he had walked out of prison after a life sentence for murdering his ex-wife. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Esa Kalle Vihtori Åkerlund: the 1993 restaurant stabbing he was acquitted of,...

Saturday morning, 14 March 2009. An 80-year-old woman in Helsinki is given yoghurt by the nurse who shops for her, walks with her, and is meant to keep her alive. The yoghurt tastes bitter. Minutes later she is slipping under — and the same nurse picks up the phone and calls emergency services herself. This episode of A True Crime Podcast follows host Alexander Lawson into the case of Aino Nykopp-...

Summer 1971. A white Dodge Dart on a Finnish highway. A hitchhiker puts out her thumb. She never gets out. In this episode of A True Crime Podcast, Alexander Lawson tells the story of Ensio Kalevi Koivunen — known as Häkä-Enska, Carbon Monoxide Enska — and the three young women who died in his car: Salme Metsänikula, 23, and seventeen-year-olds Ritva Raijas and Pirjo Laiho. There was no knife and...

In one of the safest countries on earth, a man strangled his mother, a twelve-year-old girl, and two more women — and walked out of prison again and again. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Jukka Torsten Lindholm, later Michael Maria Penttilä: the only Finn the FBI is said to have classified as a serial killer, a man psychiatrists called extremely dangerous, and a justice system that kept giving...

Friday night, 18 October 1974. A twelve-year-old girl thumbs a lift on a quiet road in Ørsta, Norway. A white Ford Taunus with black stripes pulls over. Two half-brothers are inside. She never makes it home. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Terje Antonsen — the younger brother, the addict, the man psychiatrists called easily led — and the crimes he committed with serial killer Edgar Antonsen. H...

A white Ford Taunus with black racing stripes stops on a dark road in Ørsta. A twelve-year-old girl puts her thumb out for a lift home. She never arrives. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Edgar Antonsen — one of Norway’s few serial killers — from the 1962 murder of neighbour Bertha Holten, wrongly written off as suicide, to the 1974 rape-murders of photographer Oddbjørg Helene Jystad and twelve...

On a Friday in July 2011, a bomb tore through Oslo’s government quarter. Two hours later, a man in a police uniform stepped onto the island of Utøya, where hundreds of teenagers were at a Labour Party youth camp. By nightfall, 77 people were dead — most of them young. Host Alexander Lawson reconstructs the day Norway lost its sense of safety: the blast in Regjeringskvartalet, the hour of killing o...

Kongsberg, Norway. 13 October 2021. A quiet evening. Then a man in socks walks into town with a hunting bow, sixty arrows, and knives. In thirty-four minutes, five strangers are dead. Police already knew his name. Norway’s security service had flagged him. Psychiatry had diagnosed him years earlier. Still he reached Hyttegata. Host Alexander Lawson tells the story of Espen Andersen Bråthen: the at...

He killed a prison officer during an escape, executed a gang leader on contract, and spent almost his entire adult life behind bars — then walked out on leave again. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Stig Millehaugen: the Tveita gang years, the 1992 Sarpsborg shooting, the 2009 Young Guns murder, the escapes, and the 2026 death in a Kongsvinger cell. Listener discretion advised.

In a Norwegian village of two thousand people, four neighbours were murdered within a few hundred metres of their own front doors. In 1991, elderly siblings Aase Helene and Arne Odvar Nordby were stabbed and robbed in the home they had shared for decades. A year later, pensioner Per Rød vanished — until children looking for a football found his hand in a compost heap. On Little Christmas Eve, shop...

In a Norwegian nursing home, the man in charge was supposed to keep people safe. Instead, a court said he used a theatre drug to stop their breathing — twenty-two times. He confessed. Then he took it all back. And he denied every killing until the day he died. Alexander Lawson tells the story of Arnfinn Nesset: the orders that didn’t belong, the rooms he left, the trial that made him Norway’s most...

Reykjavík, 13 February 2021. A man parks outside his home. His wife and children are inside. From a garage, someone is waiting. Nine shots. A silenced pistol. Less than a minute. Iceland almost never sees an execution on a residential street. Then Angjelin Sterkaj killed fellow Albanian Armando Beqirai in Rauðagerði — a case that became one of the largest investigations in Icelandic history, bounc...

On a Sunday morning in August 2010, Hannes Þór Helgason was stabbed to death in his home in Hafnarfjörður, Iceland. The man who killed him was a childhood friend of Hannes’s girlfriend — a 23-year-old who had already declared his love for her on YouTube, driven her home that night, and later sent condolences on Facebook. I’m Alexander Lawson. This episode of a true crime podcast follows the murder...